There was a vaguely demob-happy air this morning around Chelsea's Cobham training ground. Didier Drogba emerged in flip-flops to receive the Premier League Golden Boot he'd seemed so preoccupied with at Stamford Bridge on Sunday – plus the Golden Loafer from the zanies of Soccer AM, reward for his table-topping goals-to-minutes ratio.

In reception a man in a very smart suit could be heard attempting to sell the services of his private jet franchise to a rather-bored looking first-teamer. And all seemed well with the world at the Surrey retreat of the freshly crowned Double-chasing champions, right up until the first sighting of John Terry in a pink surgical ankle boot heading off to hospital for a scan on his right foot, which had been damaged in a tackle in training.

Terry was, as a Chelsea statement said, "walking freely" as he left Cobham, although this is no real indication of the severity of the injury. True, he had no crutches and he even looked a little bored by it all.

So far the news is actually quite encouraging. Some have already said the injury might not be as bad as first feared. Terry might even, at a push, make the Cup final. Right now all we can say for sure about the latest medically themed moment of operetta to afflict England preparations for a major tournament is that it seems suitably dramatic. Terry's season had already become a swirl of personal disaster and pyrrhic triumph, perhaps to be capped at the last by a moment of kismet on the training field. This is of course a little dramatic, but it is hard not to adopt a sweeping tone when attempting to make sense of a season of genre-defining high-end drama.

Given the possibility that things may not be as positive as Chelsea and Terry hope, the most important issue immediately arising relates to England's central defensive personnel at the Word Cup. Fabio Capello has indicated he intends to take only fully fit players to the World Cup. If we take him at his word, and should Terry's prognosis indicate a summer spent with his surgical boot up on some Dubai sun lounger, there would seem little point in calling a replacement into the 30-man squad. Jamie Carragher, Michael Dawson, Rio Ferdinand, Ledley King and Matthew Upson are already there. In Terry's absence all five would probably go, with Ferdinand and Upson a likely first-choice pairing.

Beyond that it's hard to know what effect Terry's absence would have. Circumstances have already dictated there is no longer a need to find another captain. Perhaps his absence would change the dynamic of the group slightly; armband or not Terry provides vocal and physical leadership on the pitch and a forceful voice off it, but there might be some England players relieved at not having to accommodate their most noisily bombastic head boy.

Some close to the team might even be quietly thankful for a diminished roster of media subplots, the opportunity to fend off questions about Ledley's afternoon pool routine rather than straying into the more peaty territory that has tended to surround Terry. You can sense this already, perhaps, in the eagerness with which news of his injury was seized upon, the immediate assumption that his World Cup must, surely, already be over.

Perhaps this might even be the shock that makes us a little more grateful for what we've got.

Terry would be a big loss for England. He may not be the player he was three years ago. His mobility may be hampered by lingering niggles. A tendency to hurl himself into the tackle rather than match stride for stride has been identified – the canary in the coalmine when it comes to declining powers in a centre-half and a habit more likely to be exposed in the rarefied air of a World Cup than playing at the heart of a compact and habitually dominant Chelsea team.

But Terry is still what England have got. He is a central tent pole in the Capello marquee. Plus he is also a man who knows how to win matches, a trophy hog for all his apparent physical limitations, and a hard-head of such swaggering braggadocio he has somehow managed to emerge from a season of personal meltdown with his most immediate problem perhaps not being able to waggle the second of his two major trophies around at Wembley on Saturday.

Some will be relieved if the diagnosis is pessimistic. There are those who simply don't like Terry for reasons other than football, and others who feel his style and range of defending no longer deserve a place in the team. At least if Capello is true to his word we should be spared the worst of all worlds, a half-fit Terry camped out in his oxygen tent for the next three weeks.

Still, confronted by the cold, hard fact of that surgical ankle boot it is hard to make a case that England would be any closer to World Cup winners with the ageing outsiders King and Carragher carrying the fight; ahead of a player who, for all the apparent enthusiasms of his personal life, is undoubtedly still a role model when it comes to winning matches.